I am not overly knowledgeable about video formats and am having difficulties converting a .flv video to an .AVI format that poser can read. I have now used several conversion programs with no success. Every video player I put it in will read it as .avi, but poser won't display it. I know I have it plugged into the right spot because I have tested it with .avi files I have made in Poser and a few other avis I have downloaded. I have read that there are many variations of .avi files and I was wondering which ones Poser can read and if there are any free conversion softwares available to do the job. Apparently VLC player can convert to .avi, but I don't know what video and audio formats to use. Any help on this would be great. Thank you.

Try uncompressed frames and no audio.

The audio probably won't matter.  I don't think Poser reads the audio channel.

Yeah, the audio isn't really important. I just tried it without the audio, but poser still won't read the resulting .avi. I am trying both VLC and Amidemux, but neither seems to offer the option for uncompressed frames; they both require I pick a codec. Can you recommend any software that can do this?

At worst you can always use VirtualDub to produce an uncompressed AVI from an encoded one.

You might get MediaInfo (http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en) and find out what the characteristics are of the .avi files that Poser can read - codec & settings - so you can try to duplicate them.

VirtualDub is probably a good bet. I recently found a plugin, "FLV Input Plugin"  that will allow it to read and convert .flv files. (http://moitah.net/) - you'll also need ffdshow installed (link on site). It worked fine for the couple of .flv files I've tried it on. Hopefully you can find a successful combination. Uncompressed is going to be quite large. I would think that there's a codec that Poser will work with - probably an older one I'm guessing. 

Note that the moitah.net site also has a FLV Extract utility that might help as well but you'll probably have to re-encode the extracted .avi anyway to get poser to read it, but it's an alternative if you can't get VirtualDub to read the .flv.

Thanks for the advice. I actually just finished tearing apart my whole house looking for my copy of Movie Edit Pro which I just remembered I had bought about three years ago and never used. It should be able to convert the video. I don't know why they would make poser use such a limited type of video files. Did they even address that issue in Poser 8? Oh well, thanks again.

Attached Link: http://atube-catcher.dsnetwb.com/get-video-software-windows-home/content/banco-datos-Welcome-Home-Pa

If that doesn't work, set the conversion codec in that app to WMV.

Bring the converted FLV into Windows Movie Maker, export it as a WMV  and then use this.... 
http://www.appfree.net/wmv-to-avi-mpeg/
....to convert from WMV to AVI.

You'll have to play around a bit to get the best quality but a mix of these and other stuff you have on your drive will do the trick.

I've just created a presentation where the video sources came from many diverse sources including youtube (with approval), animations from poser 4 and 8 and all put together using the bog standard Movie Maker and it looks OK  even on a  large 6ft electronic whiteboard.

 how do you check which codecs Poser 6 can use?

The mannual doesn't say how.

One trick I've used before when having problem importing into a video editor, is look at what it can export and then use the same codec/filetype when importing stuff. 

Not that scientific, but it usually works :)